Alright, so I’ll take a break from the theory talk and too much seriousness. I wanted to write briefly about the current state of hip hop. The current state of hip hop has some conspiracy wrapped in it too ironically. You can’t get away from these topics wherever you look. So back in the Genesis of hip hop, emcees wanted to show how large their vocabulary was. How many similes and metaphors they could use. It was about storytelling with lyrics or even just educating with lyrics. I’ve heard rappers from that era talk about walking around with a Thesaurus so they could keep their wordplay sharp. We went from that, then in came the gangster rap. There came a group of young guys called NWA. Not all of them were really gang members or lived that life, but they certainly looked the part. They were rapping about a life in many ghettos around the country and it was captivating to a lot of people. Once the industry saw how well that type of music sold, they started putting more acts together that approached hip hop in that way. A lot of the guys they found were fake gangsters, and hadn’t gang banged a day in their life, but again they looked the part and were good talkers, so people bought it. Around that time, there were some conscious rappers like Mos Def, Common, Talib Kweli, and lesser known atists like Shabazz the Disciple but that style of rap generally wasn’t in the main stream at a certain point. There are people that say that gangster rap was ushered in as an effort to further corrupt the minds of the people, especially young black people. There’s a lot of compelling evidence on that topic. Professor Griff’s book “The Psychological Covert War on Hip Hop” is probably the most notable work tackling that subject. Even with gangster rap, lyrics had remained a part of the craft although they were often vulgar and profane. Fast forward to the hip hop of today, and much of the lyricism has been lost. There are rappers in mainstream now that have no talent and are not skilled writers or wordsmiths. They call some of it mumble rap, and that’s exactly what they do on a track. Back in the early days, a rapper had to spend time writing in his or her rhyme book, then from there you had to pay a lot of money to get studio time to work with someone to make a decent beat for you and to record a demo tape or any tracks at all. These days, a $300 laptop is capable of running a music creation program that would allow a wanna-be rapper to make beats to their hearts content. Not only that, but people with actual talent, who may not be well known, are able to make beats and distribute them on the internet for low prices, whereby these mumbling rappers get ahold of it and mumble over it. There’s a current rapper that’s well known that got “discovered” on Soundcloud with a song or two he made and put up there and that got traction. The young kids of the day listen to the music and they even say they don’t care about the lyrics, they just like the beat. There’s a whole science behind that statement, but it has to do with the dumbing down of people gradually from the food we eat, the things we see, and the music we hear. When I was young and also at this age, even though Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Jefferson Starship, Lisa Stansfield and other people weren’t necessarily from my generation, I still had the ear to recognize it as “good music”. Some young people listen to Nas or Mos Def and think it’s trash music. They have no ear for music. Music on a whole has taken a huge step back, and the amazing talents of Mo-Town and yesteryear seem to not be the music stars of our current time. People with a good “look” and a large marketing machine behind them rule the airwaves today. That’s my humble opinion on that. I love music, but most of the new music that comes from newer artist isn’t worth the time of day. Til next time….
Hip Hop Headz….
